Bless This Mess

Tomorrow is Elias’ birthday, and I thought I’d share this hilarious video of him from about six months ago. He loved waving Hi to himself on video so much that I decided to show him a video he took of himself saying Hi. When he started saying Hi to that video, I recorded it. Life would absolutely not be complete without my sweet Easy E. I’m so glad we were able to have you, buddy.

This year we inadvertently made some really terrifying carved pumpkins. Anthony and the kids got to it in early October while I was napping my bronchitis away, and when I awoke we had three adorable little pumpkins on our back porch.

Anthony drew a blank pumpkin on a piece of paper and Isobel designed a drawing of what it should look like, carefully labeling each part. We all really loved the idea of giving her a blank pumpkin to draw on because she doesn’t quite have the skills to carve her exact ideas yet, but this way she can still imagine them and participate. She had the idea of carving the ears from the pumpkin lid, and Anthony used straw from our archery target straw bales to create the whiskers. Pumpkin seeds made the perfect cat eyes. She helped him scoop the pumpkin innards out, too.

Once that pumpkin was done, she felt ready to try a pumpkin on her own. We have one of those kid-safe pumpkin carvers, and after Anthony helped her cut off the top and scoop out the innards, she drew and carved the face of the green and yellow pumpkin completely on her own. Her first! She did a great job. She really wanted to carve Gourdy La Forge, her BFF, so Anthony helped her carve a hole in the bottom (since the top was so small) and scoop out what little there was inside. Isobel made the bottom piece into a beret and, with some help, carved the face herself, too.

After the sun went down, I put electric candles inside (for reasons both of practicality and safety) turned off the patio lights. They looked so cheerful. The kids were ecstatic at the result and as it was the weekend I let the kids stay outside and play with flashlights while we listened to the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack. It was so warm all throughout October that even at 9 pm it was closer to 90 degrees F than not. Isobel was overdressed but insisted wearing her Wasp costume from last year. Elias and I were in shorts and a t-shirt and feeling a little too comfortable in them for fall.

Our pumpkins were adorable, but the unseasonable heat contributed to turning our adorably sweet pumpkins into something inadvertently sinister. We still had a few 100 degree days to go before Halloween, and many days reached 90 degrees plus. We moved these pumpkins to the front of the house where the sunlight is intense, and that’s how you go from these friendly pumpkin faces to…

You a gamblin’ man, Sandy?

…Something out of the Nightmare Before Christmas. It looks like the unholy baby of Jack Skellington and Oogie Boogie. It was the biggest pumpkin, and therefore held the most moisture, and rotted the fastest. But a lower moisture content didn’t save the other pumpkins from demonic visages. Check out the humble Gourdy La Forge’s transformation from this…

Abandon all hope, Ye who trick-or-treat here

…To this. Gourdy would have imploded entirely if it weren’t for the candle inside keeping his shape together. Isobel’s green and yellow pumpkin matured into an orange and yellow fruit before it, too, became possessed with the soul of the damned:

It’s a good look for you.

These were by far the scariest pumpkins we’ve ever made, purposely or not. Climate change is evil.